managed to do without these
Mephistophelian visitants, and the bright pigment so largely used by
shepherds in preparing sheep for the fair is obtained by other routes.
Even those who yet survive are losing the poetry of existence which
characterized them when the pursuit of the trade meant periodical
journeys to the pit whence the material was dug, a regular camping out
from month to month, except in the depth of winter, a peregrination
among farms which could be counted by the hundred, and in spite of this
Arab existence the preservation of that respectability which is insured
by the never-failing production of a well-lined purse.

Reddle spreads its lively hues over everything it lights on, and stamps
unmistakably, as with the mark of Cain, any person who has handled it
half an hour.

A child's first sight of a reddleman was an epoch in his life. That
blood-coloured figure was a sublimation of all the horrid dreams
which had afflicted the juvenile spirit since imagination began. "The
reddleman is coming for you!" had been the formulated threat of Wessex
mothers for many generations. He was successfully supplanted for a
while, at the beginning of the present century, by Buonaparte; but as
process of time rendered the latter personage stale and ineffective the
older phrase resumed its early prominence. And now the reddleman has
in his turn followed Buonaparte to the land of worn-out bogeys, and his
place is filled by modern inventions.

The reddleman lived like a gipsy; but gipsies he scorned. He was about
as thriving as travelling basket and mat makers; but he had nothing
to do with them. He was more decently born and brought up than the
cattledrovers who passed and repassed him in his wanderings; but they
merely nodded to him. His stock was more valuable than that of pedlars;
but they did not think so, and passed his cart with eyes straight ahead.
He was such an unnatural colour to look at that the men of roundabouts
and waxwork shows seemed gentlemen beside him; but he considered them
low company, and remained aloof. Among all these squatters and folks
of the road the reddleman continually found himself; yet he was not of
them. His occupation tended to isolate him, and isolated he was mostly
seen to be.

It was sometimes suggested that reddlemen were criminals for whose
misdeeds other men wrongfully suffered--that in escaping the law they
had not escaped their own consciences, and had taken to the trade as a
li